Uncommon Business is a blog about people who make money online selling unusual, strange and sometimes bizarre things or provide curious services. This isn’t “One Hundred And One Ideas For Your Homebased Business” – only real, working businesses with URLs provided, so you can do further investigation on your own. And if you do own an unusual web business, make sure you submit your story to us. SHLD

Saturday, June 01, 2013

People often underestimate the importance of
SaaS marketing optimization.

Certainly in most cases, once a plan is worked
out, some initial level of optimization is conducted, or else every marketing
campaign in the history of SaaS would fail horrendously. Unfortunately, the
cursory tweaking is usually all that is done. Sure, the marketing plans usually
work out if the plans themselves are solid on a basic level, but they could
work better.

Considering you must have a good positive ROI on
your SaaS marketing strategy, optimization is a great way to work toward this
goal. Unfortunately, how to optimize marketing in this industry seems like an
elusive bit of knowledge to many, so with that in mind, maybe we ought to talk
about some of the more important and basic tenets thereof.

First and foremost, we need to talk a little bit
about demographics. I don't need to talk about how important demographics are
to any marketing campaign, be it SaaS or otherwise. But, while you surely
regard it as important, and pay a lot of attention to it, there's probably some
optimization here you might not think of trying. Heck, I didn't think of this
until a far wiser marketing guru pointed it out to me either!

There's something to be said for allowing some
slack in relevance when targeting demographics. In SaaS, this is mostly in the
purpose or industries your software may target, but this is a generality in
marketing as a whole. See, if you find the relevant points that make this your
demographic of choice, then you can expand on demographics this target may
associate with, and relate to them on all or some of the same points that form
the triad. This creates a larger outreach and potential user base, while still keeping
focused on a general demographic set. It sounds odd, but it does work!

Now, with this retargeting of your demographics,
your campaign should shape up a bit and not seem as oddly specific or out of
sorts as it probably does, because a bit more generality of demographic will
also bring general relation in the campaign as well.

Now, let's talk about testing a little bit. When
testing, there are of course a couple phases you have to work through. Now,
initial in-testing before doing anything external, there's probably nothing you
really do wrong. This is pure scientific method and mostly, it's the
programmers who are doing this testing, and they see the world in a unique and
alien way, compared to that of marketing.

It's the external testing, or the Alpha/Beta
phase, that we need to address here. This is where civilians come into the
equation, and you can get real hard data on how potential users perceive the
product. This is where big immediate flaws in functionality, design or UX
overall should be spotted. Many software firms mess this up, SaaS and
otherwise.

Here's the scoop. Everyone does this testing far
too passively. The best way to see customer reaction to errors, or how well a
scheme works when being used complexly is to put the test subjects in complex
situations. Basic encounters only test the surface of the software. Have
scenarios of significant complexity you wish them to test. This may mean being
a bit more selective with your test subjects, but that is a small sacrifice to
make. Also, with good tutorial software that can onboard with your SaaS, you
can guide them through processes if need be.

Now, we come to one last place where everyone
really messes SaaS marketing up. Metrics, statistics and logistics are easy to
be overzealous with. They say you can't measure something too often, but
"they" are wrong. You need to know the right time, pace and level of
detail to take these metrics, otherwise you'll have too much, and numbers in
statistics will be too diluted with fluff.

Consider which metrics are the most important,
and consider how often to measure different ones. If you're more selective and
synchronous with your measurements, you'll be able to see much more clearly,
and avoid mistakes or working hard rather than smart in many scenarios.

So, there's a lot to be done with optimizing
SaaS marketing, but none of it's terribly complex. Of course, it can go deeper
than this, but you haven't time to read a lot of literature on this subject,
and really who does? In that case, these are the big points to take away from
the subject, in my very modest opinion.